Abstract
Funding was provided by a variety of military and governmental funding sources from several nations acknowledged within referenced publications, notably the US Office of Naval Research, US Navy Living Marine Resources Program, and the navies of the USA, Norway, and the Netherlands. P.L.T. acknowledges the support of the MASTS pooling initiative (The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland) in the completion of this study. MASTS is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011) and contributing institutions.
Highlights
Ethologists recognized that baseline observations provide key insights for developing hypotheses about animal behavior and designing experiments to test them
Experimental approaches using controlled exposure experiments (CEEs) to study marine mammal behavioral responses to noise have been derived from traditional sound playback experiments to study natural communication
Playback methods have been adapted and applied to free-ranging marine mammals using CEEs to test potential responses to various human noise sources, including examples involving low frequency coded signals (Frankel & Clark 2000), low frequency active (LFA) sonar (Miller et al 2000, Fristrup et al 2003), seismic airgun surveys (Miller et al 2009, Cato et al 2013, Dunlop et al 2015), and low-level tonal signals (Nowacek et al 2004, Dunlop et al 2013). Their application to studying behavioral responses to naval sonar in the 1−8 kHz range is an area of active research considered here
Summary
Ethologists recognized that baseline observations provide key insights for developing hypotheses about animal behavior and designing experiments to test them. Perhaps the strongest motivation for additional behavioral research arose from a series of lethal cetacean strandings coinciding with active sonar (~0.5−8 kHz) testing and training This phenomenon was first noted from mass strandings in the Canary Islands and Greece (Simmonds & Lopez-Jurado 1991, Frantzis 1998) and became more widely recognized following a well documented, highly publicized mass stranding in the Bahamas in 2000 (Balcomb & Claridge 2001), for which the US Navy acknowledged a causal association (Evans & England 2001). Efforts to formulate science-based noise exposure criteria (e.g. Southall et al 2007) were motivated by the need to improve regulatory assessments and mitigation of potential harm from human sound sources, including sonar This increased interest and concern has resulted in major advances in both basic and applied scientific understanding of marine mammal behavior and potential effects of noise. These studies have substantial scientific and regulatory implications for endangered, threatened, and protected species
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